Season on the Chalk

From Ditchling Beacon to Épernay.

Europe’s chalk deposits started to accumulate some hundred million years ago. They grew at therate of about a millimetre per century until they were more than three hundred metres thick. Photograph by John Holloway.Credit “SNOW, SEVEN SISTERS 1” (1991)/IPG BATTLE

The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and—from Erith Reach to Gravesend—under fifteen miles of the lower Thames. My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water. Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat—skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream. He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. Chalked graffiti line the revetment and have attracted the attention of Tommaso, who now starts his own with the letter “R.”

One of the stranded skiffs is painted a bright orange, and large letters on its tilted-up side say “The Crown and Thistle Public House.” A yellow skiff, also askew, says “The Terrace Tavern Public House.” A red one represents “The George Inn, Queen Street.” When the tide has turned and the skiffs are up on the water, the pubs race one another. This is the beginning of the Thames Estuary, where, in centuries gone, a thousand ships would be anchored, waiting to go up into London.

“O”

Tommaso is taking his time with these letters, because he is using an ambitious font. The lines that have formed the “R” and the “O” are four inches wide. An armada of swans, in single file, swims out from near shore and toward the center of the river—thirty-eight swans. Here, above the chalk, is where the Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor, waiting for the tide to turn, while

the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

Marlow then described to his friends on the yawl’s deck his journey to the heart of darkness.

“C”

Tommaso goes to Fulham Prep, and recently bet a number of his classmates a pound apiece that he would not win the Form Prize. He won the Form Prize and went bankrupt.

“K”

With his rendering of ROCK, he has won the admiration of his grandfather for his evident devotion to earth science. He has also drawn a crowd. Average age: seven. Quietly and respectfully, they watch this older artist, his concentration undisturbed. He leaves some space and begins a new word, with another “O.” In the Nellie’s time, the last decade of the nineteenth century, the river here at Gravesend was full of troop ships, cargo ships, and emigrant ships, waiting on tides. And more than tides. They sometimes waited for weeks before sailing. On hulks and barges, boatmen serving the ships lived on the river with their families and with their cats, dogs, chickens, sheep, and cows. Now downriver comes the Tor Belgia, out of London, with a six-deck rear house, followed by the Arco Humber, spewing bilge, a floating cadaver of ulcerated rust. Pilot boats, ratlike, scurry away from these tankers. Docked across the river in Tilbury is the Russian ship Annoya, of nine Cyrillic letters and a six-deck house. A motor yacht goes by, so elegant that it appears to be lost—seems to be seeking Lake Geneva.

“N”

ROCK ON. I didn’t say he was William Butler Yeats. He is Tommaso U. P. McPhee, son of Luca Passaleva and Jenny McPhee, brother of six-year-old Leandro McPhee, who is the least quiet member of Tommaso’s attentive crowd. With a large white “S,” a second line begins, and gradually becomes SKI-MAN, a character in a screenplay that Tommaso has written and intends to direct. Backdropping this scene, up the bank above the prams and the Sunday papers, are the parapets and big guns of an eighteenth-century fort, vastly amplified in the nineteenth by Chinese Gordon of Khartoum, and meant to blow out of service anything afloat that might threaten London. Tommaso adds a peace symbol to his completed graffito.

East of Gravesend is a town called Chalk, with a thoroughfare called Chalk Road, a barber’s called Chalk Cuts, and a neighborhood called Chalk Park, where mobile homes have tile roofs. In a cottage still standing on Chalk Road, Charles Dickens spent the honeymoon of his ill-fated marriage, picking at “The Pickwick Papers.” The M2 runs on the chalk as far as Faversham, where the chalk drifts southeast to Deal and Dover and the Kentish cliffs above the English Channel. From the water, in the approach to Dover, the chalk cliffs under their cap of vegetation are like the filling in a broken wafer, a cross-sectional exposure of the nation’s basement. More resistant than some rocks to the effects of weather, the chalk stands high, and its landform suggests on a magnified scale the swells and waves in the water beside it. This karst topography, as it is called, carries on toward London as the North Downs, and from any number of its high points the view to the south goes uninterrupted for thirty-odd miles before it is stopped by an east-west band of high chalk that more than suggests a range of mountains. The reciprocal scene, northward, from Devil’s Dyke or Ditchling Beacon or almost anywhere on the ridgeline of the South Downs, was described by John Constable in 1824 as “perhaps the most grand and affecting natural landscape in the world—and consequently a scene the most unfit for a picture.” Easily, instantly, your eyes take in a thousand square miles of low terrain in pastel greens and browns, a region too broad to be called a valley but known since Anglo-Saxon England as the Weald. “It is the business of a painter not to contend with nature,” the surprising Constable explained, “but to make something out of nothing, in attempting which he must almost of necessity become poetical.” And, true to his artistic standards, this surpassing English landscape painter sketched almost nothing of the hackneyed panorama of the Weald.

The South Downs Way, a public and ancient footpath through fields and over stiles and under notably few trees, stays up on the highest ground between Eastbourne and Winchester—a hundred miles. In billows of chalk, the Downs rise from the sea and go on rising northward to elevations approaching a thousand feet, culminating in the escarpment that plunges to the Weald. The declivity is so steep that funiculars have been built to ascend it. Spring-line villages developed at the base, where waters come out of the chalk. To the Anglo-Saxons a weald was a woodland and a mountain was a dun. Words that were good enough for Caedmon and Bede are not for recycling now. So the Downs are up and the Weald is down, beyond the spring-line towns.

East of Ditchling Beacon, where bonfires signalled the approach of the Armada, the South Downs Way passes close to Breaky Bottom. This is a small, deep, roughly circular valley countersunk in the highest chalk, walled in on all sides by rims about a mile across—an enclosed coombe. A form of dry chalk valley, it has no stream. Not many miles from Brighton and Hove, it seems nonetheless as remote as a valley in Nevada. Sequestered, secretive, sheltered from its windswept environs, it has an intimate and fairly level floor that is covered with orderly rows of vines. I would like to say that I arrived on foot, coming off the ridge, but I was actually a passenger in an aqua Audi driven by H. G. T. P. Doyne-Ditmas, of Brighton. We came up past Piddinghoe on the River Ouse and on by steep fields full of rolled hay to a whitish chalk track, pitted and rutted, extending a mile and a half beyond a sign that said “No Through Road.”

We descend, helically, and park under a horse chestnut near a flint wall, a house, a flint barn. We step into a scene of utter quiet. Call this the most peaceful place in Europe—willows over the flint garden wall, a line of poplars against the sky, cattle like brown pebbles far up the circumvallate grazings, fewer than few human inhabitants, proprietor nowhere in sight. He is in his kitchen, conferring with a buyer.

While we wait, we walk among the grapes—Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Seyval Blanc, as Doyne-Ditmas is aware, because he discovered Breaky Bottom some years ago, and tasted the still and the sparkling wines, and later rang up a former colleague of his—who had become Deputy Private Secretary to the Queen—and suggested that Her Majesty’s government buy and serve this patriotic wine, especially the generic champagne. Think of it—English champagne! From the Palace, the former colleague said thank you very much but the government already are a Breaky Bottom customer, and the champagne—or, strictly speaking, the méthode champenoise sparkling wine—is much in use “for government entertainment, including entertainment by the Queen.”

Doyne-Ditmas has a fraternal niece named Caroline, who was Princess Anne’s head groom during Princess Anne’s competitive equestrian years and is now one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting. At the equestrian events, Caroline was sometimes asked by Special Branch police officers if she was “related to Mr. Doyne-Ditmas of the Box.” She affirmed that she was. The Box is MI5.

Peter Hall, proprietor and viticulteur, comes out of the house, says goodbye to his customer under the chestnut, and turns to us. He is wearing a white T-shirt, and he’s a man of middle height, with friendly eyes, an intelligent pate, a fringe of white hair, a tanned face, a white beard, and a talent for non-stop talking. First off, he orients us to our surroundings by quoting “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Demetrius to Helena: “I’ll run from thee and hide me in the brakes.”

Next he tells us that his mother was French, his father English, and his brother died of AIDS in New York. His father was the author of a memoir on fly-fishing in Scotland. His brother is commemorated on the labels of Breaky Bottom’s Cuvée Rémy Alexandre. Peter Hall says “vinn yard,” accent on the “yard.” “I’ve always liked small scale,” he continues. “I’m happy to be the owner-driver of what I do.” At the moment, he has only about fifty thousand bottles laid up in various stages of development. Recent government orders have brought him “thirteen thousand nine hundred pounds of taxpayers’ money.” We go into his flint barn. His fermentation tanks are from Italy. His wine press, French, looks expensive and a great deal less nauseating than a stomp of bare feet. It is a stainless cylinder with an interior bag. Come harvest, grapes go into the cylinder. The bag swells with compressed air and squeezes the grapes. The air goes out; then the bag refills, and squeezes the grapes a little more. How much did the thing cost?

“Twenty-five thousand quid,” Peter Hall says.

Nobody says “quid” anymore, Doyne-Ditmas is silently reflecting.

The Breaky Bottom cave is not down in the chalk, as one would expect. It is a large space in the barn—sealed, insulated, firmly kept at twelve degrees Celsius by a pricey air-conditioner. How pricey?

“Ten thousand quid. To burrow into the chalk would have been a hundred thousand quid.”

Peter Hall came here in the nineteen-sixties on an internship after taking an agricultural degree at Newcastle University. Breaky Bottom was a wheat and cattle farm. He lived “in a tiny cottage and worked for the farmer.” After his year was up, he asked if he could stay another year. “As long as you don’t talk so much,” the farmer said. Peter married the farmer’s daughter. They produced four children, and the farmer offered him a tenancy. Now the marriage is in the past, Peter has a different companion, and the farmer is dead.

On the six planted acres at the bottom of the dry chalk valley, the behavior of water is unpredictable. The coombe is, in effect, a giant cistern collecting rain, of which there is no shortage. But chalk is porous, and, in Peter’s words, “the chalk takes all the water.” When it receives so much that it can hold no more, this streamless basin develops a full-bore flood. Such an event occurs roughly once in five years, leaving almost enough time for a vintner to become complacent.

“I’ve flooded five times,” Peter says.

What does that do to the vines?

“It buggers them up. Vines like their feet dry.” Just as vines do around Reims and Épernay, in the province of Champagne, in northeastern France, where the wines owe their speciality in large part to the chalk that holds the roots of the vines. Chalk, like limestone, endows a fertile soil. The province has two principal areas, with differing bedrock—Wet Champagne, on sands and clays, and Dry Champagne, on younger chalk—and the Taittingers, Mumms, and Piper-Heidsiecks come off the chalk of Dry Champagne. Relatively dry Champagne. The chalk feeds water to the vines.

The kitchen in Breaky Bottom’s farmhouse trails modern kitchens by about a hundred years and is a hundred times as pleasant, with its apparatus in heavy black iron, its slanting window light, its glasses and bottles on the blue oilcloth of a large wooden table. Listening to Peter Hall, we sit and sip, appreciate, spit. A pitcher is in service as a glass spittoon. A 2003 still wine is “like sucking a lemon at half time,” we are told. “It’s refreshing, zestful.” A 1996 Müller-Thurgau is “elegantly shaped, like a Gewürztraminer, but it has backed off from there.” The main events are the champagnes (a term he doesn’t use). “This young ’03 is pretty zesty, sharp, punchy stuff.” This 1999 is “more rounded, bigger flavor—quite a drink. . . . I’m growing Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Seyval Blanc now principally with fizz in mind, to see what comes off this chalk.” Already, his production is “preponderantly fizzy,” and soon, he says, he might decide “to go a hundred per cent fizz.”

“Why would you do that? The still wines are very good.”

“If I had a herd of goats, I could sell milk to the local health-food store. If I made cheese, I could sell it for three times as much.”

During the tasting, Peter has been smoking a rolled smoke. He rolls another. After taking the wines in his mouth, he gives them a good hard squish, making a gravelly, smoky sound like a bullfrog.

For my part, I am not ejecting a whole lot of what I am sipping, and I am getting a little drunk. Doyne-Ditmas, through all, has been patient, observant, unreadable. We came here before lunchtime intending to spend an hour, and it is now nearing three in the afternoon. Doyne-Ditmas and I have known each other since we went to Deerfield Academy, in western Massachusetts. He was sent there by the English-Speaking Union and stood out from everyone else as “the English exchange student.” He had no cover then. He was the least anonymous student in the school. We concocted a plan that four years later I would enroll in his college at the University of Cambridge, which I did.

“I am now principally a sparkling-wine maker,” Peter Hall says once more, after spitting out some ’99. More broadly, he asserts that it is only a matter of time before “the U.K. will become prominent in sparkling wine.” After all, Épernay is virtually next door, just a bit down the chalk. “From here, Champagne is two hundred and fifty miles southeast and you can virtually spit there.”

From Breaky Bottom out through Beachy Head, under the Channel, and up into Picardy, and on past Arras and Amiens, the chalk is continuous to Reims and Épernay. To drive the small roads and narrow lanes of Champagne is to drive the karstic downlands of Sussex and Surrey, the smoothly bold topography of Kentish chalk—the French ridges, long and soft, the mosaic fields and woodlots, the chalk boulders by the road in villages like Villeneuve-l’Archêveque. Here the French fieldstone is chalk, and the quarry stone—white drywalls, white barns, white churches. The chalk church of Orvilliers-Saint-Julien. The chalk around the sunflowers of Rigny-la-Nonneuse. The chalkstone walls at Marcilly-le-Hayer. Near Épernay, even the cattle are white; and vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

This is a region of three hundred and twenty-three villages, spread mainly around the flaring skirts of the Montagne de Reims and below its dense upland forests. Verzy, Verzenay, Mailly-Champagne, Mutigny, Ay, Hautvillers, Châtillon-sur-Marne—each village is, among other things, a cru. Forty-four villages are premiers crus. Seventeen are grands crus. A couple of highways run past the villages, and small paved roads among them, but the lanes that traverse and connect the vineyards are for the most part little more than two ruts of scraped-off chalk. Small roadcuts in the steeper slopes among the vines expose above the chalk the sands, clays, and marls of younger age that have washed down off the mountain and veneered the chalk, resulting in what is looked upon as elixir soil for the signature wine of this province. Up in the vineyards over Ay, a Sunday afternoon in steady rain, the green vines glisten, while water on the chalk roads runs like milk. Your car goes up to its hubcaps in milk.

In the Église Abbatiale, in Hautvillers, only a few kilometres and a few hundred thousand vines above Ay, lie the bones of St. Nivard, some fourteen hundred years since they began forming inside his young body. He founded this Benedictine abbey, which, through centuries, has rung with quiet, as its church does today, if you are not disquieted by the low recorded sound of the Twenty-first Piano Concerto. This may be one of the few places on earth that could do without Mozart, introducing, as he does, a sense of sideshow in the vaulted space. Nivard’s bones are viewable, casketed in glass, while on black stone set in the floor nearby are the words “Hic Jacet Dom Petrus Perignon . . . Plenus Paternoque Imprimis in Pauperes Amore.” In the seventeenth century, Pierre Pérignon became the cellarer of the abbey, not exactly the sommelier, but not inexactly, either. His job was to gather provisions of all kinds, including wine, for the brothers’ table. He was a skilled blender, according to the geologist James E. Wilson’s “Terroir: The Role of Geology, Climate, and Culture in the Making of French Wines,” but, contrary to Pérignon’s worldwide reputation, he did not add to the wines the magic bits of sugar and yeast that enhance carbonation in the second fermentation and result in champagne as we know it and he did not. Later, he acquired the title Dom, or Master, and what is thought to have been his way is what is meant by the words méthode champenoise and méthode traditionnelle on the labels of American, Argentine, Australian, South African, Greek, Chilean, Israeli, Latvian, Spanish, English, and Canadian champagnes.

While the landscapes of Dry Champagne bear more than a cousinly resemblance to the Downs of southern England, the underground scene in Reims, Ay, and Épernay does not call to mind an air-conditioned barn. Deep in the French chalk are hundreds of kilometres of tunnels—straight-line tunnels, curvilinear tunnels, tunnels on various levels crisscrossing other tunnels—holding more than a billion bottles of champagne. In Épernay, on the much embattled Marne, the mansions and offices of Pol Roger, Perrier Jouet, Mercier, Moët & Chandon, and others are lined up on the two sides of the Avenue de Champagne and over something like a Russian coal mine. On three levels, Moët & Chandon alone has eighteen miles of tunnels. The white walls are cool, sticky, and damp, belying the dryness overhead. The name Champagne stems from Campania, of whose dusty fields Romans were reminded when they came here. The porous chalk absorbs rain as fast as it falls, and the year-round temperature down in the caves is wintry.

Dimly lighted passages reach so far into a mournful and brooding gloom that the eye is stopped not by rock but by darkness. Along the sides, as in a catacomb, are vaults, crypts—a seemingly endless series of crypts, typically six feet by sixteen feet, like one-fifth of your one-room apartment. The tight space notwithstanding, in each crypt lie some twenty thousand bottles of champagne. There are workrooms down here in the chalk, and among the many talents of the workers the most technologically advanced is riddling. It is two centuries old. When yeasted and sugared wines have lain flat long enough to build up their sparkle, the yeast and other sediments inside the bottles must be removed; and how does one do that without losing the bubbles? Enter the veuve Clicquot, the enological Edison, widowed in 1805 and left in control of her husband’s Remois winery, where she became, in effect, the first riddler. She placed the ready bottles on an A-framed rack, tilting them neck down, and she gradually steepened the incline as weeks went by. Once a day or so—to dislodge the yeast from the bottle walls and to stir up the sediments—she gave each bottle a sharp turn to the right and a sharp turn back to the left, then stopped its rotation a little farther along than it had been. In the annals of addiction, not even whole Greek islands terraced to the sky in vines, or Falernian vats holding enough wine to intoxicate the Tenth Legion—not even the great Heidelberg tun—could be more emblematic than a portrait of a riddler in the chalk. One riddler can turn thirty thousand bottles a day, and with each turn, and each additional degree of tilt, the grubby items in near-suspension in the otherwise diaphanous fluid gravitate into the neck of the bottle. After eight weeks or so, a palpable plug is filling the neck—a plug as soft and repulsive as phlegm. The neck is locally frozen, as if by a dermatologist. The bottle is turned upright. The carbon dioxide in the champagne drives out the frozen plug, and the bottle is swiftly capped with a wired-down cork mushroom. Machines controlled by computers do most of the riddling now, but when the machines break down, as they do, riddlers are here to take over.

Moët & Chandon has about twenty-five hundred acres of its own grapes and buys a great many more from villages around the region. The company uses two skinless reds and a white, and generally begins its champagnes with still wines of three successive years. The top of the line is labelled Dom Pérignon. It is made only from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, is nearly a hundred per cent from grands crus, and is aged seven years. This is not the Médoc. In your flute, what will matter is not a unique vineyard but the status of the various places where the grapes grew on the chalk.

In 1822, the Belgian stratigrapher J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, working for the French government, put a name on the chalk of Europe which would come to represent an ungainly share of geologic time. Collectively, d’Halloy called the English downlands and the white sea cliffs and the bottom of the Channel and Dry Champagne—and so forth—Le Terrain Crétacé. Chalky it surely was, and soon the word not only made the jump from adjective to adjectival noun but also from geologic system to geologic period—from rock to time. With the arguable exception of the Carboniferous, the Cretaceous is the only period in the forty-six hundred million years of the earth’s history that was directly named for a rock.

While nineteenth-century geologists were able to establish the relative ages of various formations by noting what lay over and under what, they had no way of measuring the amount of time the units represented. Radiometrics now suggest that the Jurassic Period, which precedes the Cretaceous and was named for a mountain range, ended about a hundred and forty-five million years ago. Then on came the Cretaceous, with its flying reptiles, its rudistid clams, its titanosaurs, dromaeosaurs, elasmosaurs, duck-billed and ostrich dinosaurs, and introductory flowering plants, not to mention Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus rex, and all the marine invertebrates that disappeared in the Cretaceous Extinction, sixty-five million years ago, a date better known to modern schoolchildren than 1492. In the Cretaceous was more time than there has been since the Cretaceous. The Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene add up only to four-fifths of the eighty million years of the Cretaceous. The chalk it is named for developed during roughly half of Cretaceous time—temporally the more recent half, stratigraphically the upper half. The chalk is made of the calcareous remains of microscopic marine plants and animals that lived in the water column and sank after death—slower than riddled yeast—in epicontinental seas. The chalk accumulated at the rate of about one millimetre in a century, and the thickness got past three hundred metres in some thirty-five million years.

The beds that rise closest to the date of the extinction are known in French geology as Le Crétacé Supérieur, in England as the Upper Chalk. This is the chalk of the vineyards and Downs, the chalk of the Champagne cellars, and it wraps around the Paris Basin and down to the Touraine. But then it disappears as the country continues in older lithologies, in collisional juxtapositions of magmas and metamorphics, of Precambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, and Devonian rocks. Oddly, though, in isolation, Le Crétacé Supérieur outcrops in Cognac. Five hundred beeline kilometres from Reims, the chalk of a couple of the uppermost Cretaceous stages is concentrated under vineyards east and southeast of town. The spirit that derives from these vineyards is labelled “Grande Champagne cognac.” Next door, where the soil is a bit less favorable, the product is labelled “Petite Champagne cognac.” There are many other cognacs, but none is superior, Cretaceously or otherwise, to the champagne cognacs.

In the nineteenth century, the long unwieldy geologic periods were subdivided into stages and ages—respectively of rock and time. Three of the four highest levels of the Cretaceous are the (successively younger) Coniacian, Santonian, and Campanian. These are universal in the scientific vocabulary, applying to whatever happens to be of identical age anywhere on the planet. Coniacian is a reference to Cognac. Santonian refers to the town of Saintes, fifteen miles up the road. Campanian, of course, is a nod to Champagne. Imagine these names being tossed about at the Chinese Geological Survey. Cognac is on the Charente, which flows along a fault line that trends east-west. On the south side of the river are the Grande Champagne vineyards of the late Cretaceous. The north side is Jurassic and not in the conversation.

The youngest of all levels of Cretaceous chalk was identified by the stratigrapher André Dumont in 1849 and called Maastrichtian. The adjective refers to the Dutch town where, as it happens, the euro would come to be (in 1991) and the European Union would form. It is the provincial capital of Limburg, which hangs down eccentrically from the southeastern corner of the rest of the Netherlands. The river Meuse, which rises in France and flows six hundred miles to the North Sea, becomes the river Maas when it crosses into Holland. Maastricht was where the Romans forded the Maas. Much of its bedrock is Maastrichtian chalk.

On the Onze Lieve Vrouweplein, a square in the old core of Maastricht, is the frankly modern Hotel Derlon, which is evidently as unembarrassed to be looking out on ancient and medieval Europe through large rectangles of plate glass as it is justly proud of the Roman ruins in its basement. They were discovered in 1983 during the hotel’s reconstruction, and they include massive foundation walls of quarried chalk and a water well surrounded by chalk blocks as much as two feet thick. Carefully excavated archeologically, these Roman artifacts are as well protected as they would be had they been carted off by the British Museum. Do not enter. Do not touch. Just sit down at a ruinside table and dine in this hallowed space, which the hotel calls Museumkelder Derlon. Maastricht has other Roman vestiges, and they also are made of quarried chalk. For many centuries, Maastricht was a walled city, and large segments of its sixteen-foot chalk walls still stand. Maastricht remains intimate, self-contained, vintage European—a city of chalk basilicas and chalk churches, one of which is eleven centuries old. Where was all that chalk quarried? Surely not under the city. Have you been to the grotten in Sint Pietersberg, just five miles up the river? No? Party of five? Take one of the bootsfahrten.

The boat is long and mahoganied with waiters and a bar, and casts off from the left bank above the Sint Servaasbrug, the oldest bridge in the Netherlands. At this same site was a Roman bridge, which lasted about a thousand years and fell into the river in the twelve-seventies. Sint Servaasbrug, with seven piers, dates from 1280. The boat swings under it, and up the center of a long reach through the city, the right bank glassy and corporate, the left bank’s skyline tiled, turreted, and ecclesiastical. The left bank is to our right; the right bank is to our left. Such river runes are not beyond the grasp of Livia Svenvold McPhee, who is six and quick to learn, but they’re off the scale for her two-year-old brother, Jasper, and, dare I say it, their father and mother, Mark Svenvold and Martha McPhee. The breeze is cool on the open deck, and the boat is soon running past saturated fields that resemble the fens of Cambridgeshire which are also on the chalk. Jet Skis circle the boat, and weave Olympic rings around slow-moving barges full of crushed cars. Other barges, carrying ores and grains, are everywhere on the river, as are private cabin boats, nosing around the barges like pretentious tugs.

A steep but modest hill comes into view off the left bank: literally, on Dutch maps, a mountain—Sint Pietersberg. What the berg is made of is not a great mystery in this province. E.N.C.I.—Eerste Nederlandse Cement Industrie—is carved into its base, where the Comité d’Étude du Maastrichtian confirmed this place as the type locality of the final stage of the Cretaceous. We have come to see an operation that is a good deal older than E.N.C.I., though, and we climb the hill past and above E.N.C.I. until we see what could easily be mistaken for the entrance to the Carlsbad Caverns, or to Luray Caverns, or to Mammoth Cave. With the difference that this excavation is absolutely unnatural. The word grotten is used for its subterranean galleries—the Grotten Sint Pietersberg—but this is not a cave, or a series of caves. It’s a mine. Specifically, it’s a chalk quarry—an intermittent source of building stone across a scale of time approaching twenty-one hundred years. The grotten actually are much like the tunnels of Moët & Chandon, which—heaven help us—are called caves but also are not caves.

For well casings, foundations, fortifications, and bathhouses, among other things, the Romans were the first to go into the mountain, and they did so for several hundred years, giving up the quarry in the fourth century. Its rock is a less than pure-white chalk, tanned by enough clay to be called a marl. In a group, you follow a guide with two electric lanterns, suspended from bails like railroad lanterns. He hands one to the last guidee in line, then leads the way into darkness, cracking jokes in English. His name is Leon Frissen. He is short, stocky, balding, and friendly. You follow him down and down through a gallery system, and if you’ve ever been in a salt mine the place reminds you of a salt mine. The constant temperature is ten degrees Celsius and you shiver. Now you are about thirty-five metres below the surface. The gallery walls are seven metres high. The lantern light is the only light. It throws awkward, lurching shadows. Seeing me struggle to write notes, Frissen takes a flashlight out of his pocket and gives it to me. Rounding a corner, we look down a straight corridor into a mournful and infinite gloom. Frissen says the corridor goes on for several kilometres before the next bend. He says there are three hundred and fifty kilometres of galleries in and beyond the mountain, hewn, by blokbrekers, with three tools: chisel, hammer, and saw. The quarrying resumed in the thirteenth century and continued until 1926.

Allied pilots, shot down during the Second World War, were taken into the tunnels and led underground to Resistance forces in nearby Belgium. The route was known as the Pilots Line. On tunnel walls, it was blazed by drawings of doves. In the Sint Pietersberg galleries, you see doves not only on the walls but also on the thick and natural pillars of chalk left standing to prevent the collapse of the mine. From 1942 to 1945, Dutch museums hid more than seven hundred works of art inside the mountain, including Vermeer’s “The Little Street” and Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” a huge canvas (fifteen square metres) that spent the rest of the war rolled up as a stalagmite. After surface telephone lines were destroyed by German bombs, a line was run through the grotten keeping connections open with Belgium and northern France. Maastrichtians and other people of the province hid in the mountain, especially while battle raged through Limburg. You see a niche chapel far underground, and Stations of the Cross. There was a bakery, a hospital, and three churches, two of them Roman Catholic. Twelve thousand people were inside the mountain in late summer, 1944. Maastricht was freed by Allied troops, mostly American, on the fourteenth of September. A few kilometres east of the mountain, in the Netherlands American Cemetery, eighty-three hundred soldiers are buried in the chalk.

Graffiti in the tunnels in the mountain—drawings, advertisements, people’s names—can be arranged as a sort of timescale of the ages of quarrying, just as the scale of the ages of the Cretaceous rise through Berriasian, Valanginian, Hauterivian, Barremian, Aptian, Albian, Cenomanian, Turonian, Coniacian, Santonian, Campanian, and Maastrichtian time.

There are names on the walls from 1551.

Among swinging shadows in lantern light, the name of Don Ferdinand Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, appears with the date 1570. (His headquarters were on the mountain. Spanish troops massacred thousands of Maastrichtians on a single day in 1579.)

Someone called Olivier left his name in the grotten in 1660.

As did Ianno in 1681, with a word about the quality of his oil. (Ianno was a merchant. To the blokbrekers, he sold linseed oil for their lamps.)

Rosa de Horlon was here, her name on the wall: 14 mei 1781.

Napoleon Bonaparte 1803.

Martha: “Why was Napoleon here?”

Guide: “Why are you here?”

Martha considers this an inadequate answer.

Too busy scribbling, I keep my question to myself: If Napoleon knew what was inside the mountain, and other tourists toured the quarry in the nineteenth century, why were the Nazis unaware of the Maastrichtian refuge and the Pilots Line? (According to Rik Valkenburg’s “Ondergronds Verzet: Illegale Transporten door de Grotten van de Sint Pietersberg-Maastricht in 1940-1944,” Maastrichtians convinced the Germans that it had become physically impossible to move people or goods to Belgium through the mountain. They took the head of the local Gestapo on a selective tour of the grotten and drove home the point. German soldiers did occasionally patrol parts of the vast subterranean maze, but the Resistance knew their routes and schedules. Travellers on the Pilots Line shrank back into lightless caverns.)

Ferocious mosasaur, sketched on a tunnel wall in 1907—the big-headed, long-toothed, long-bodied predatory reptile that lived in the Cretaceous ocean and its epicontinental seas. “Mosasaur,” misleadingly, means reptile of the river Maas—actually a marine creature, not riverine, discovered inside Sint Pietersberg in the eighteenth century, fifty years before the earliest description of dinosaurs. Mosasaurs were as much as fifty feet long, swimming like snakes toward the Cretaceous Extinction.

On the chalk near the mosasaur: a 1948 drawing of the Dutch royal family, the present queen, Beatrix, as a princess ten years old.

Returning to sunlight, we start to descend the hill, and Livia has a question for her mother.

Livia: “Why was granddaddy writing all those notes?”

Martha: “Ask him.”

Livia: “Granddaddy, why were you writing all those notes?”

Scandinavian blond, beautiful beyond reason, as swift of mind as she is beautiful, etc., etc., Livia is nonetheless not yet in first grade. She will not know from Maastrichtian time. In explanatory dialogue with her, who could use a term like Cretaceous Extinction, let alone trace the Upper Chalk to the end of Cretaceous time?

Granddaddy: “They got bigger and bigger, and there came a time when they all disappeared from the earth. Right?”

Livia: “Yes.”

Granddaddy: “Have you ever wondered what killed them?”

Livia: “Asteroid, or volcano.”

As we go down the mountain, I keep looking at her in wonder, yes, but in fading disbelief. Her reply to my question actually adds up to something more than a good story to tell about a beloved six-year-old granddaughter. It is also an index to conventional wisdom, and to the speed of its development. The hypothesis that a big asteroid—a so-called bolide, or Apollo object—hit the earth sixty-five million years ago and sent up enough particulate matter to darken the atmosphere and cut off the food chain was published in 1980. It was surprising news. The physicist Freeman Dyson referred to it at the time as “the most interesting piece of science” he had read in ten years. Now a freshly turned-out kindergarten graduate lists it first among the causes of the death of the dinosaurs. And so, I think, would a majority of people on the planet who are aware, to whatever extent, of the Cretaceous Extinction. What was unknown not many years ago is conventional wisdom now. The 1980 paper, in Science, reported the research and conclusions of Walter Alvarez, a geologist, and his father, Luis, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. Their idea stemmed from the globally widespread presence at the Cretaceous-Tertiary stratigraphic boundary of certain platinum-group metals rare on the earth but common in meteorites and other extraterrestrial objects. The crater of a very large asteroid was later identified in and around northern Yucatán, its impact of appropriate age. Walter Alvarez told the story in a lively and well-received book called “T. rex and the Crater of Doom.” By now, the discovery has become so well established that it has made its way down through the grades and even into preschool.

Not everyone has become a subscriber, though—not even the population of every West Side kindergarten, as one could see in Livia’s response, “Asteroid, or volcano.” I wish she had said “volcanism,” but what can I do? She isn’t seven yet. Before 1980, a number of other researchers matched the Cretaceous Extinction to the vast outpouring of flood basalts that solidified as the Deccan Traps. From countless fissures, at least forty-five hundred trillion tons of incandescent lava poured out across more than two hundred thousand square miles of what is now western India. Those eruptions—so the “volcano” hypothesis goes—altered the entire atmosphere and broke the food chain, with the result that some two-thirds of all species on earth perished, a fact that is legible in the fossil record. Flood basalts of such magnitude occur when geophysical hot spots first manifest themselves on the earth’s surface. The heat is escaping from regions in or near the earth’s core, and it rises through the mantle in a thermal plume that melts a vast quantity of mantle and crust and drives it out at the top. A hot spot lasts about a hundred million years. While a tectonic plate—a thin shell in this context—slides over the hot spot, it is repeatedly penetrated by the plume, like a piece of cloth by the needle of a sewing machine. Over time, many hot spots have come and gone, leaving vestiges like Bermuda and the Bahama Platform. The Musician Seamounts, in the North Pacific Ocean, are the track of a dead hot spot. About twenty major ones are active in the modern world, such as Hawaii, Iceland, Mt. Cameroon, Tahiti, Madeira, and Yellowstone, which began in Oregon and Washington as the Columbia River flood basalts and has stitched an east-moving track while the North American Plate, moving west, has slid over its penetrating plume. “Traps” is a term that derives from a Swedish word that means stair steps. It describes the appearance—on the Malabar coast, in the Columbia Gorge, etc.—of successive lava flows that harden as basalt.

The Cretaceous Extinction ranks second to the Permian Extinction—at the end of the Paleozoic Era, about two hundred and fifty-one million years before the present—in which ninety-nine per cent of all animals on the earth, of every size, from large to microscopic, were killed. At the Paleozoic-Mesozoic stratigraphic boundary, there is no known deposit of extraterrestrial platinum-group metals, nor is there any other form of evidence of an asteroid impact. Flood basalts, though, occurred right then, covering roughly a million square miles of Siberia to depths exceeding twelve thousand feet. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, the geophysicist W. Jason Morgan, whose work on geophysical hot spots has been regarded by some as an even larger contribution to the advancement of science than his revelation, in the nineteen-sixties, of the basic geometries of plate tectonics, reacted to the asteroid hypothesis by noting that a skein of mass extinctions (including the Cretaceous and Permian Extinctions) coincide with the initiation of hot spots. Flood basalts in the Central Atlantic, for example, mark the end of Triassic time.

Meanwhile, not a few paleontologists interpret the fossil record in a light that deëmphasizes both the Yucatán catastrophe and, to a lesser extent, the flood basalts. The paleontologists take such things into full account, but what they assemble from the evidence in the rock is a laminated story, far less clear and far more complex. In a 2005 paper in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, the Princeton paleontologist Gerta Keller mentions depletions of ocean oxygen, global warming, and pronounced rises of sea level among the developments that have prefigured mass extinctions, whether volcanism and asteroidal impact were or were not involved. In a paper published in 2001 in Planetary and Space Science, Keller says of the Yucatán asteroid, “This theory unquestionably has great sex appeal. The largest and most fascinating creatures that ever roamed the Earth were wiped out in a single day in a ball of fire caused by a meteorite impact that leaves behind the crater of doom. . . . The existence of an impact crater alone, however, neither proves nor explains the demise of the dinosaurs, or the mass extinction of any other groups.” In the words of Monica Wojcik, one of Keller’s undergraduate students, “Essentially she sees the end-Cretaceous as what she calls ‘the bad-luck theory’—a bunch of natural events piling up at once.” Add to the equation continental drift, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and glaciation, among other things. Climate has been severely altered as continents have changed position, not only in latitude but also with respect to one another. In the late Ordovician, for example, as three ancestral continents coalesced on their way to becoming the northern part of Pangaea, there was about ten times as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as there is today, large parts of the landmass were thickly covered with ice, and the period ended with a two-phase mass extinction that is thought by some paleontologists to have been even deadlier than the Cretaceous Extinction. “In this case,” Keller says, “all fingers point toward glaciation” as the leading cause. “Glaciation causes turnover. Cool water brings toxic things up from black shale.” The Ordovician ocean became anoxic. When the dying occurred, there were no bolides peppering the earth and no fresh flood basalts anywhere.

It’s enough to ruffle conventional wisdom, unsettling the jury as to who killed whom, and what killed what. While the earth moves on toward the first mass extinction caused by a living species, debates about earlier ones are really unresolved.

Loose on the Downs with Harry:

The top leadership of MI5 was an inverted T—one over one over five. Doyne-Ditmas was among the five. And now he’s twice retired and at large atop the chalk cliffs, coolly walking the fenceless lip in rain driven by forty-mile winds, his white hair streaming. When he was nineteen, in Massachusetts, he was Lord Mountararat in “Iolanthe.” Now he is Hal Doyne-Lear on the chalky bourn—Gloucester with eyes. He says it is “raining stair rods.” What a peculiar expression, methinks. Stair rods hold carpets to stairs, while dogs and cats gauge rain. These are the white cliffs of Sussex—Cuckmere Haven to Beachy Head—the whitest in the Cretaceous Terrain, fairly glaring in the sun when there’s a sun. Eroded in a rhythm of reëntrants and promontories, they call to mind a row of clerestory windows. Almost straight down them—hundreds of feet—are waves. Hal holds his camera over the edge. After MI5 and elsewhere in government, he took the name Harry and halved his professional surname to become Harry Ditmas. Behind us, the view north is of a vast deep swale and then the rising hills, cattle far up there like chocolate bits. Looking for something as original as the stair rods, I ask Harry what sorts of words the English choose to describe their remarkable downlands. He says, “ ‘Rolling’ comes along rather quickly.” To the east is Beachy Head, the highest, giddiest chalk cliff in Britain, where the Upper Chalk emerges from the English Channel to become the South Downs. “God is always greater than all of our troubles,” says a small plaque a few yards from the edge. And a sign: “The Samaritans—Always There, Day or Night, 735555 or 08457 909090.”

Chalk is calcium carbonate. Limestone is calcium carbonate. Why these cliffs are chalk and not limestone is a matter of ocean chemistry, of whether the mineral vestiges of planktonic life, settling on the seafloor as oozes and muds, needed to recrystallize as limestone or could indurate in their original texture. Pure calcium carbonate—CaCO3—can vary in mineral structure. The word for such differing forms is “polymorph.” Diamonds and graphite, both of which are pure carbon, are the world’s most renowned polymorphs. Aragonite and calcite, mineral forms of CaCO3, were the first polymorphs described in the history of chemistry. Aragonite is unstable and needs to recrystallize as limestone, while pure calcite is content to be chalk. In Phanerozoic time—a term that embraces the five hundred and forty-four million years before the present—the ocean has alternately been a calcite ocean and an aragonite ocean, changing three times. It was a calcite ocean when the white cliffs formed. It’s an aragonite ocean now. Limestone, slowly, is soluble in water (those caverns and caves), but it is also hard and impermeable (the Empire State Building). Chalk is soft and porous. The Chunnel goes through chalk. Le Souterrain Crétacé. When the Chunnel opened, in 1994, the Department of Transport’s director and coördinator of transport security—responsible for the security of everything that rolled, flew, or floated in the United Kingdom—was Harry.

His full actual name is Harold Granville Terence Payne Doyne-Ditmas. Whatever he is called, I have a question for him: how fast are these cliffs eroding? Alone one morning on the Undercliff Coastal Walk, near Ovingdean on the way to Rottingdean, I picked up a hunk of chalk the size of a rugby ball that had just fallen from above, its fresh broken facets pearl-white. Chalk rains on the pavement of the Undercliff Coastal Walk, and breaks down underfoot, turning into pewter mud (lime ooze) and recapitulating its history. Signs everywhere: “Do not use the Undercliff in bad weather. The sea and sea defences can be hazardous. Falls of chalk and flint can occur without warning.” “Keep off the groynes.” Doyne-Ditmas reminds me that erosion rates are not among his preoccupations. He answers my question empirically, though, driving to the water’s edge at Birling Gap and stopping before a coast-guard barracks that, like a motel, is a long narrow terrace, a set of attached “cottages.” The building’s axis, running north-south, is ninety degrees to the line of the beach, which, for miles on either side, is also the line of the cliffs. Dating from the nineteenth century, the coast-guard barracks were built symmetrically, their beachward and landward arms meeting in a central unit of somewhat different proportion. But one arm now is a good bit shorter than the other. The once central unit is eccentric. The end that reaches toward the sea has been, in effect, lopped off by the sea. In a chalk boulder field near the building, some of the fallen boulders are ten feet in diameter. A lighthouse up the cliff was recently moved back seventeen metres, to keep it from falling with the chalk. The cliffs of Sussex are being eroded, we learn, at an average rate of about thirty-five centimetres a year. Thus, in forty thousand years the Downs will be down to the elevation of the Weald, and in a couple of hundred thousand more the cliffs now at Dover will be standing in London or Gravesend or Chalk. Sounds slow, but geomorphologically that is fast. Nowhere near as fast, however, as the excavation of the English Channel. The two most relevant masses of ice that covered northwestern Europe in late Pleistocene time were the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet and the British Ice Sheet. The latter, a mile thick, covered most of Ireland, all of Scotland, all of Wales, and England south to a line more or less between Cambridge and Oxford. With ice on North America and so much of Europe, sea level was some four hundred feet lower than it is at present. The Thames Valley was not glaciated, and the Thames flowed out into a larger river, known in geology as the Channel River, which ran between England and France through dry land bedrocked with chalk. When the ice melted, the meltwaters turned the Thames into a hydroplow and the Channel River into a cold Amazon, fed also by the Rhine, the Maas, the Somme, and the Seine, and from Scandinavia as well. This was the greatest river system that has ever drained Europe, and without much resistance it gouged out the English Channel and drove back to the two sides the chalk cliffs of France and England. Erosion rated, Harry pauses at a blackthorn to collect a pocketful of sloes for his next batch of sloe gin. Jackdaws, peregrines, kittiwakes, and kestrels are overhead. Sloes are like hard blue grapes.

In Hal’s early years in the Box, he sat for a time at a desk next to David Cornwell, an exact contemporary who left the service to extend his career as John le Carré. Hal served abroad at times—in Kuala Lumpur, for example, and in Moscow, where his cover job at the British Embassy was “line manager of a hundred local staff, all, presumably at least, co-opted workers of the K.G.B.” As he went to bed in Moscow each night, he imagined that if he were to speak aloud in a dream the K.G.B. would be recording what he said. He served in Belfast in the nineteen-eighties. A night came when he and his wife, Julia, “had to do a rapid moonlight flit,” leaving their house “permanently and forever,” after it was realized that his cover was blown. In Eastbourne, under Beachy Head, he shows me the prep school from which he was evacuated during the Second World War. Like the Normans at Hastings, which is ten miles from Eastbourne, the Wehrmacht intended to invade this coastline. Loose on the Downs, I keep thinking of those cattle nearly infinitesimal far up the rolling grasslands, and remembering that in his prime Harry could have picked one off. While the rest of us were playing rugger, squash, tennis, or basketball, Harry was firing rifles at extremely distant targets. His public school, Uppingham, had been by his literal description “far and away the most successful shooting school.” He had competed in Britain and Canada as one of the Cambridge VIII, and after Cambridge he went global on British national teams. I went out to a range with him once in those years, near Woking, in Surrey, on the chalk of the North Downs. We looked far across the coalescing hills at targets smaller than cows. Gratuitously, Hal observed that his sport was not played with a moving ball you could dribble. As he describes it now, success or failure depended on “ability to judge the wind, and not being nervous; being able to concentrate; not to panic when the pressure is on.” Golf with gunpowder. The bull’s-eye was twenty-four inches wide. “You might have to allow for twenty-five feet of drift at a thousand yards. We used ordinary Army-issue .303 rifles, essentially unimproved.” On a wall at his home in Brighton are two antique nineteenth-century rifles—one from each side at Tel-el-Kebir. His grandfather Edward Ditmas brought them home.

Close up, the chalk cliffs appear to be studded, almost like formal shirts, with uniform black dots. They line up in horizontal rows. Spaces are even from dot to dot and also between rows, which are about a metre apart. The impression given is of bedding planes, but those horizontal rows are not bedding planes. Sponge spicules and other forms of organic silicon were among the impurities in the original chalk deposit. Within a given and consistent cubic dimension of chalk, the contained silicon dioxide will gather itself until it forms a very dense silicon-dioxide nodule, which is also known as cryptocrystalline quartz. Like chert, agate, jasper, and chalcedony, flint is cryptocrystalline quartz. Those black dots in the chalk cliffs are chunks of flint. The shingle beaches below the white cliffs consist almost entirely of flint cobbles the size of ostrich eggs. If you stand next to a chalk cliff and lift your head, you look up a wall spiky with projecting flints. When they fall, they sometimes break. A cracked-open surface, opaque and light to dark gray, is smooth and shines like glass. The old structures of half of Sussex, not to mention Surrey, seem to be made of flint—flint churches, flint terraces, flint houses reinforced with bricks at the corners, flint retaining walls bordering sunken lanes. Doyne-Ditmas seems especially fond of the big flint prison in Lewes, its flints, black and gray, “giving it a sort of piebald aspect.” In some flint construction, the nodules were left whole. More often, they were hammered open—cracked like walnuts—so that their flat glassy surfaces would shine. The process is known as knapping and the results are knapped flints. Some flints were knapped so painstakingly that their outer surfaces were not only flat but also rectangular. In building walls they seem to be obsidian bricks.

Parting glimpses of the chalk:

In Downe, on the North Downs, in Charles Darwin’s Down House, is a portrait in chalk of Darwin’s wife, Emma. A billiard table is on display, no lack of chalk for the cues. Darwin did all his great work in this place, where he lived after the Beagle for the rest of his life. He and Emma had ten children. Darwin played a lot of billiards, possibly to get away from the children but certainly, as he wrote in a letter, because “it does me a deal of good, and drives the horrid species out of my head.” His garden walls are panels of stratified flint. If you drive here from, say, the north side of the Thames, you move very slowly from stoplight to stoplight through the heavy density of South London, scarcely a patch of green, and then, suddenly, you’re in Darwin’s Downe, on swelling land among pony carts and open fields, horses, jodhpurred women perched in saddles, knapped flints like oyster shells up the wall of a country teahouse called Evolution 1.

Flints from English chalk ignited the powder that answered the shot heard round the world.

Flints from English chalk ignited the muskets that broke the Scottish clans.

Chalk is the bedrock of Salisbury Plain, so the stones of Stonehenge came from as far away as Wales.

Romans on the English chalk built roadbeds of flint cobbles and covered them with compacted gravel and slag.

One Roman road ran close by the White Horse of Uffington, if the white horse was—as it is claimed to be—already there. Scraped into the chalk of a steep hill in the Berkshire Downs, the white horse is three hundred and seventy-four feet long.

The Long Man of Wilmington, scraped into the chalk of the South Downs escarpment—his date of origin unknown—is two hundred and thirty-five feet tall.

The Cerne Abbas Giant, on a bald hill in Dorset, is a chalk figure a hundred and eighty feet tall, also known as the Rude Man. His penis is erect and thirty feet long. His testicles are ten feet wide. English couples ascend the hill, lie down on the giant, and couple. Women who wish to conceive spend a night alone on the penis.

The storied streams of Hampshire run in their fecundity over Upper Cretaceous chalk. In Newton Stacey, where the Dever meets the Test, you walk down to the confluence as if circling a room from one Constable landscape to the next—passing through hedgerowed fields and under horse chestnuts, opening and shutting gates, “BEWARE THE BULL.” Coot are swimming on the River Test, two swans and four cygnets on the Dever. Over the junction pool, an ash ripe with ash keys spreads its canopy across the two rivers. They are surprisingly narrow and intimate, not much more than brooks—the Test, the mother stream, scarcely three feet deep and thirty wide. Its bank, squared off and shored with planking, is level and closely mowed so that anglers can walk beside the water unimpeded, dry shod, with no thought of stepping in. It just isn’t done, stepping in. The air is full of damselflies, midges, mayflies, swifts, and swallows, the sandy chalky bottom thick with cress and water crowfoot. The angler is wise to creep along the footpath, or, at least, to tiptoe. One unwary step and a two-pound brown explodes from cover under the lip of the bank and vanishes upstream. You sit down on a bench and think it over. Arctic grayling, which have even higher standards of water quality than trout do, share this sacred water, as does Esox lucius—the piscivorous Devil, the savage Fiend, the pike—known to grow as large as one stone three consuming trout. The underwater water crowfoot grows so fast that the waterkeeper mows it like the grass. In his fish garden, beside the Dever, the waterkeeper’s shed roofs are thatched, a bull trout is memorialized that was “killed August 1934,” and drying at the tops of posts are the heads of four huge pike. ♦

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